Page 232 - sons-and-lovers

the three brothers in the hay piled up in the barn and tell
them about Nottingham and about Jordan’s. In return, they
taught him to milk, and let him do little jobs—chopping
hay or pulping turnips—just as much as he liked. At mid-
summer he worked all through hay-harvest with them,
and then he loved them. The family was so cut off from the
world actually. They seemed, somehow, like ‘les derniers
fils d’une race epuisee”. Though the lads were strong and
healthy, yet they had all that over-sensitiveness and hang-
ing-back which made them so lonely, yet also such close,
delicate friends once their intimacy was won. Paul loved
them dearly, and they him.
Miriam came later. But he had come into her life before
she made any mark on his. One dull afternoon, when the
men were on the land and the rest at school, only Miriam
and her mother at home, the girl said to him, after having
hesitated for some time:
‘Have you seen the swing?’
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Where?’
‘In the cowshed,’ she replied.
She always hesitated to offer or to show him anything.
Men have such different standards of worth from women,
and her dear things—the valuable things to her—her broth-
ers had so often mocked or flouted.
‘Come on, then,’ he replied, jumping up.
There were two cowsheds, one on either side of the barn.
In the lower, darker shed there was standing for four cows.
Hens flew scolding over the manger-wall as the youth and
girl went forward for the great thick rope which hung from

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